'Just a matter of existing:' Menasha native Fred Flom on 6 years as POW in Vietnam

Fred Flom, a Menasha native and former U.S. Air Force pilot, spent more than six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam after he was shot down Aug. 8, 1966. He lives in Dallas but also owns a cabin near Waupaca.(Photo: Wm. Glasheen/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)Buy Photo

Fred Flom was afraid. His arm was broken. The rest of his body was covered in cuts and burns.

He was alone in a cell made of concrete. He had a bucket with a lid for a toilet and a cup for water, but nothing else. He could hardly move around.

“You could take three steps,” he said. “That’s all you could take in the cell.”

Flom was in Hoa Lo Prison, which is better known by a different name: the Hanoi Hilton.

The Menasha native was a 25-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot when he was shot down on Aug. 8, 1966, about 55 miles northeast of Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam. His F-105 Thunderchief was hit by anti-aircraft fire. He doesn't remember much about the incident.

“I don’t even remember ejecting myself. The airplane just blew up and I was out in a fireball,” he said. “The next thing I remember I had already been captured.”

Flom would remain a prisoner of war for more than six years, enduring torture and nearly two years in solitary confinement.

“The minutes and hours went exceedingly slow,” he said. “But it’s just a matter of existing.”

‘I always wanted to fly’

Flom grew up in Menasha as the youngest of four siblings. He spent much of his time playing sports with other kids in a park near his parents' house.

He graduated from Lawrence College — now Lawrence University — in Appleton in 1963, then was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force. He hoped to become a fighter pilot.

“I always wanted to fly, ever since I was a little kid,” he said.

He spent more than a year learning to fly at Williams Air Force Base in Chandler, Arizona, then moved to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, where he trained specifically to be a fighter pilot.

Flom was assigned to McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas, for about a year before he was transferred to Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand.

The war was suddenly much closer, but Flom felt prepared and ready to do his duty.

“I was a good little soldier and believed everything that was told to me, and thought we were doing the right thing,” he said.

He spent most of his time on the ground in Thailand with other pilots, studying maps of the region and preparing for missions. They never sat around for long.

Buy Photo

Fred Flom, spending time this spring at his cabin near Waupaca, is now 77 and lives in Dallas. The Menasha native was a fighter pilot in Vietnam and was held prisoner for more than six years after being shot down.(Photo: Wm. Glasheen/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

Flom flew missions almost every day, but didn’t meet much resistance until he began to fly farther into North Vietnam. The missions quickly became more dangerous. He started to encounter heavier anti-aircraft fire and surface-to-air missiles.

“It got very exciting then, if you call that exciting,” he said.

He saw other pilots get shot down, but forced himself to put the danger out of his mind.

“You didn’t think too much about it,” he said. “When you’re a young fighter pilot, you think nothing is going to happen to you.”

Until it does.

Flom was shot down. He woke up in a locked cell, injured but alive.

‘Kept you alive’

Flom spent his first two years in captivity almost entirely by himself. He slept on a concrete bed. The light never went out.

The only people he ever saw were the guards who brought him rice and a thin pumpkin soup twice a day. He was constantly hungry. He dreamed of food.

He couldn’t call out to other prisoners. The guards would beat them if they tried to talk to each other.

“I knew there were other prisoners around, but I never saw anybody for quite some time,” he said.

He was only able to communicate with other prisoners with a tap code they used to spell out words. They talked about anything and everything, Flom said, and asked any new prisoners if they knew when the war would be over.

“That was the thing that kept you alive,” he said. “You were always going to be home by Christmas. Or after Christmas, you would be home by the Fourth of July.”

Support local journalism

He wasn't given anything to occupy his time. Mostly, Flom thought about what he would do if he ever made it home.

And Flom endured things much worse than boredom. He was beaten and repeatedly hung from a rafter by his ankles until he passed out. He was asked to reveal future bombing targets — he didn't know any — and make anti-war statements.

“They wanted written confessions from war criminals,” he said. “That’s what they called us. We were criminals. We weren’t prisoners of war.”

He eventually agreed to write a statement. He wrote he was sorry he bombed Vietnam and would never do it again.

“Half of that was true, anyway,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t going to bomb them again.”

'We knew it was over'

Flom moved to different prison camps several times, including a grueling trip to a camp near the Chinese border that didn't have electricity.

He spent the trip to that camp handcuffed and blindfolded in a truck with other prisoners. But when they returned to Hanoi, none of the prisoners were handcuffed or blindfolded.

"We knew it was over then," he said.

His time as a prisoner of war was about to come to an end.

Flom was released as part of a ceasefire that began Jan. 27, 1973. He returned to the Fox Cities on March 24, 1973, to a crowd of about 4,000 people at the Outagamie County Airport, according to a Post-Crescent report published the next day.

He gave his 8-year-old daughter, Julie, a hug and greeted his 6-year-old son, Erik, who hadn't been born when Flom left.

"I don't feel like a hero," Flom told a reporter that day. "It's difficult to consider myself a hero coming out of a prison camp. I'm just happy to be coming home with honor."

Fred Flom greets his daughter, Julie, 8, and his son, Erik, 6, March 24, 1973, at the Outagamie County Airport. Flom, a Menasha native, had spent more than six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.(Photo: Courtesy of Fred Flom)

Flom is now 77 and lives in Dallas. He still spends a few months each year at his cabin on a lake near Waupaca.

He didn't stop flying after he returned from Vietnam. He joined the Wisconsin Air National Guard and spent 25 years as a pilot for American Airlines. He retired nearly two decades ago.

When he looks back, Flom questions whether the U.S. should have even been involved in Vietnam.

"Trying to spread democracy is not something we should probably do with force," he said. "It seems to get to the right places at the right time anyway."

But he doesn't dwell on the past. Instead, Flom tries to focus on his life now.

He still gets together with a group of former prisoners of war every few years. They don't talk about what they experienced.